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I am a very private person and felt very awkward with the whole parading around and showing off my ring and such, but it seemed to make him so happy that I didn’t have the heart to disappoint him.
Then a month before the wedding, when the news of our impending nuptials had traveled far and wide already, he surprised me with a vacation, and everything changed forever.
I guess he thought that with the ceremony so close, nothing would have messed with his plans for us, and so he decided we didn't have to wait to be married to sleep together, after all.
Intimacy with him really showed me the ugly truth; it was like sex flipped a switch on him and changed his whole personality.
So loving and protective slowly morphed into patronizing and domineering.
The Jonathan I thought I knew and loved simply disappeared leaving his place to an arrogant and selfish man and a cold and unfeeling lover. He became a total and complete stranger to me.
Now I know he was sure he could show his true nature by then because he believed we were as good as married and that I would never call off the wedding and bring such a scandal down on my family when he had taken such good care of behaving like the perfect fiancé in public and made sure a wedding announcement was printed on every possible newspaper on the planet.
I was shocked, pained, and nearly destroyed by his abusive ways, and at first, I didn't know how to act. It felt like I was in a nightmare from which I could not wake up, I was stunned and confused, but it didn't take me long to gather myself.
Before the two-week-long vacation was up, I realized our relationship was nothing but an illusion, and the man I believed I loved and was ready to share my life with didn't even exist.
Jonathan merely wanted to gain control of Preston International or, more precisely, of funds he could pour into his own company, and had no use, nor love for me, aside from considering me a toy for his pleasure and, worst of all, he thought he held such control over me that he made no secret of his feelings and plans and had the nerve to even admit to having been cheating on me practically since the start.
It came as a great surprise to that chauvinistic bastard, but I did break the engagement and called off the wedding. I could not give a fuck about what people would think. I knew my parents and my friends would understand, and I felt confident they would back my choice up one hundred percent.
My ex-fiancé didn’t even have the grace to slink off silently.
No. He had to make a big fuss about it and depict me as a heartless Ice Queen —the Press still clings to that stupid nickname when talking about me to this day.
I was right about my mom and dad being supportive, but, sadly, I was way off the mark about those I considered my closest friends. They were only too eager to buy into Jonathan' pitiful lies, just like those mean-spirited, bloodthirsty tabloid columnists did.
Their betrayal in the face of the pain Jonathan had put me through hit me very hard, and along with being the center of a gossip storm, it pushed me to leave the States.
It wasn't that I was scared to deal with them. It was that the whole affair had left me so drained, so tired that I needed a sanctuary, a place where no one really knew me, so I moved to England to continue my education, and once I was finished with my degree, I moved to Manchester and worked pro-bono for an NGO.
For a while, I was of a mind to never come back to Boston at all, to be honest. In the UK, I had found my balance and the strength to put my life back together, and working for that organization, I had found my true vocation and the loyal friendship of Nadine, but then my father's health started to fail, and my family needed me here, so after five years I moved back to Boston to be at the helm of the company.
In the meantime, Jonathan got married —the bastard actually married only four months after our broken engagement— to Milan Beaumont, the socialite daughter of another rich Bostonian businessman who was only too happy to get his party-crazy daughter off his hands and put his money into Withmore Investments.
No one seemed to find it strange that a man whose heart had been purportedly so cruelly broken was back in the saddle so soon after we parted, yet they still call meIce Queeneven now. Go figure.
Because of all of that mess, I still find it extremely difficult toget myself out there and have a lifelike my parents and Nadine would wish me to. I really don't have the will to do it.
Aside from Nadine, I don't have any real friends anymore, certainly none with whom I could talk and share things with.
My old gang is still a tight-knit group, but I’m no longer a part of it.
When I moved back here, I did the mature thing. I forgave and forgot and all of that. Well, as much as I could, at least. After all, I knew I had to deal with many of them as they were, and still are, doing charity work in the same foundations as myself —if for different reasons—, but while civil with them, I could never be their friend again and not only because of how they turned on me. I simply have nothing in common with them. Their lives are completely alien to me.
I see them but seldomly at functions and hardly ever contribute with more than monosyllables to the rare conversations that we do have. They all have a life —the kind of life my mom is always talking about—, husbands, fiancés, boyfriends, lovers, children, while I just have my career and wish for nothing else. I can't understand them, they can't understand me, and there's not much I can do about that.
If there's a thing Jonathan definitely managed to take away from me, that was my erstwhile ability to trust people.
After him, I no longer can do it.
It took me a long time to find stability and, if not outright happiness, at least comfort in my life and to realize that my heart was never broken because, in fact, it was never touched. After all, the Jonathan I believed myself to be in love with never existed in the first place.
My heart never really knew what love was, and I don't think it ever will.
If being deceived could be so painful when I had onlybelievedmyself in love, how damaging would such an experience be if I were to actually put my heart into it, right?
That’s why, immediately after breaking things off with that narrow-minded pig, I decided that I would fare much better being on my own and protecting my innermost feelings at all times.
